Collar stays: a great way to recycle your expired debit- or creditcard

The collars on some of my shirts require collar stays to support them. Without the added rigidity conferred by the collar stays, the shape of the collar typically assumes a wide range of visually displeasing configurations. Thus, wearing a shirt without collar stays almost inevitably results in a fashion no-no.

But shirts must also be washed, even fancy ones that require collar stays. At some point, someone will inquire why your shirt smells as if it was previously owned by a particularly sweaty colonial, has cracked yellow stains under the armpits and moldy coffee stains on the front. And you will not be able to talk yourself out of that situation by saying “Ah yes, but observe how nice my shirt collar looks, thanks to these fancy collar stays I’m using”. Trust me.

However, before washing a shirt, the collar stays must be removed or else they may detach from the collar and vanish in the laundry machine. Unfortunately, I regularly forget to remove them and I have lost a few collar stays this way. Not many, but still more than I would like.

Then, one day, I open my mailbox and find a letter from my bank. It’s a new creditcard. Having no further use for the old creditcard, I began playfully flexing it in my hand. Then it struck me that the card’s rigidity seemed quite similar to that of my plastic collar stays. So, using one of my collar stays as a template, I tried cutting a new pair of collar stays out of the old credit card using a pair of scissors.

It worked.

The original collar stay above and the fancy new credit card derived collar stay below.